Lamentatio (1995)
(for Saxophone Quartet)

Lamentatio is a work which I find extremely difficult to comment on. I haven’t actually done it before. The Stockholm Saxophone Quartet commissioned a work from me and also offered the possibility of further collaboration. I gladly prepared for this and we agreed on a period when we could work together, towards the end of September, 1994. In my diary I had made a small cross against the 26th September. The fact that I changed my plans and didn’t go onboard the ship ‘Estonia’ that day was the Stockholm Saxophone Quartet’s doing. They simply asked me to come a week later. I don’t know if the listener needs to be aware of this background: my music doesn’t describe the Estonia catastrophe in the Baltic, but for me it is inevitably associated with it.

A very poor attempt at a programme commentary. I should have written about the harmony which is based on various concepts of multiphonics, about micro-intervals and sound clusters that expand step by step. But I got personal. Let us listen to this piece as a cry from the desert regions of the soul’s landscape, which Albert Camus reaches in ‘Le mythe de Sisyphe’. 

Erkki-Sven Tüür, May 1997